Why Rewrite?

Other than always carefully reading your teacher’s comments on and assessment of your written work, from time to time you might also want to rewrite your IELTS letters, essays or descriptive reports during your preparation to try to bring your work up to standard (i.e the band score that you are hoping to get in the exam). Rewriting old writings incorporating your trainer’s tips has the following advantages.

1, It forces you to really consider your errors. Sometimes we do not notice that we have not quite understood a mistake we made until we want to correct it. Going through this analyzing process is where a lot of learning happens.

2, Surface level mistakes are easier to correct, but your tutor might point out bigger, more complex errors to do with the structure of a whole sentence, paragraph, or even the whole letter/essay/descriptive report. Rewriting these normally takes more critical thinking than just changing the spelling of a single word, as you might have to rethink the message of a bigger part of your writing, but if you manage to understand why your trainer (=your reader) did not like these parts of your work, you will become more conscious of the importance of writing according to (sub-) genre and audience.

3, If you, like many IELTS candidates, also have issues with spelling, punctuation or capitalization, rewriting will typically help you to see the whole letter/essay/descriptive report you wrote as one coherent entity. In a sense rewriting is the best spelling/capitalization/punctuation exercise, because it makes you try to improve your own words and sentences and not some random ones in a grammar book.

4, If you, like, again, many IELTS candidates, also find getting the word count right difficult, forcing yourself to keep to your planned word limit paragraph by paragraph during the rewriting process will help you get a feel for how much you should write in the different genres.

5, Ironing out the grammar and vocabulary mistakes and lexical repetitions pointed out by your teacher will also improve your future Grammatical range and accuracy, and Lexical resource grades in IELTS.

To sum up, whenever you get a piece of writing back from your teacher make sure you check three things (that is to say NOT just your grade): the in-text corrections, the overall assessment and your teacher’s final, global comments.

Here is an example to give you an idea of the whole rewriting process. In your opinion, what are the features that the candidate managed to improve compared to the first draft? What aspects of their writing do they still need to work on?

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